Ecila at HIFF

By Christine Hitt

Published: 2010.10.13 03:06 PM

The 30th Annual Hawaii International Film Festival begins this Thursday, October 14 and runs through October 24. Here we've listed all of the locally-made films, visit hiff.org for the full schedule. And, we talked to three of the filmmakers to find out what it was like to film in Hawaii.

Ecila premieres this Saturday night at the Hawaii International Film Festival and is the first full feature film by local director, writer and editor, Darieus Legg. “It’s an adventure story about a young writer, Ecila. She’s my Alice, but instead of Wonderland, she’s going into Boceno, a city full of larger than life characters,” describes Legg. Though Legg does not call Ecila an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, he does use elements from the book in parts of his film—a man on a pink moped as the white rabbit and pornographers resembling Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

A regular at Showdown in Chinatown, Legg had help from a number of local filmmakers, beginning with Robert Campbell, Ecila’s producer. “He really had my back through the whole process and really believed my vision,” says Legg. “He’s worked on Lost and Hawaii 5-0, so he was able to get access to a lot of industry professionals that know how to get the shots that I wanted that we would’ve never be able to do.”

For Legg, making Ecila has been its own form of film school, requiring 45 days of principal photography and two years of editing and special effects work. “I really hope that people see what we’ve done in this film as inspiration to do their own projects. And, if someone likes making movies, like I do, they should just throw themselves into the fire pit.”

Ecila will be showing at Dole Cannery on Saturday, Oct. 16 and on Sunday, Oct. 24. For tickets and more information, visit hiff.org.

Here we've listed all of the locally-made films, visit hiff.org for the full schedule:

ACM Night short films

Oct. 22

Watch six short films from students of UH Manoa’s Academy for Creative Media. The stories depict life in Hawaii, the Pacific and Asia.